Ber Lusim raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes? How?’
‘Well, you think Toller was your missing prophet. The one person who walked away from your hidden city without official sanction. I mean, the one person who did that before you and your people did it.’
‘I don’t think this. I know it.’
‘Because Toller talks about the secret beliefs of the People.’
‘Yes.’
‘And his book shows the location of Ginat’Dania.’
‘Yes, that too.’
‘And because he blessed his friends and followers with the sign of the noose instead of the sign of the cross.’
‘Of course.’
Rush was standing on the edge of the precipice now. He didn’t dare to look around again, to see whether either Diema or Kennedy was tracking his moves. If they weren’t, this was going to come to nothing anyway. All he could do — the best he could do — was give them a window.
‘Well, in spite of all those things, Ber Lusim, I think you’ve been cheering for the wrong team. Toller was never one of the Judas People. He was an Adamite.’
Diema used two things to stay conscious: the pain from her wounds and the countdown on her watch.
The pain was constant static along the thousands of unravelling miles of her nervous system.
The countdown stood at seven minutes.
Ber Lusim had his gun pressed against Rush’s temple now. Rush was leaning sideways, away from it, his whole body arced like a strung bow, but he didn’t dare to step back or to try to push the gun away.
‘I see your death,’ Ber Lusim said to the boy. ‘Without the benefit of prophecy.’
‘No, just listen,’ Rush quavered. ‘Listen to me. I can make you believe.’
‘I already believe.’
‘Then I can make you doubt. Why did God send me?’
‘To test me. To put my beliefs to the test.’
‘Then … then you have to take the test, don’t you? You have to listen. Blowing my brains out is just going to piss God off.’
Neither of them moved, for a moment or two longer. Then Ber Lusim lowered the gun, very gradually, to his side.
‘This is nonsense,’ he said heavily. ‘But say what you like. Nonsense can’t hurt me.’
‘Okay, look at the documentary evidence,’ Rush said, starting to babble again. ‘In your version of the story your man comes out of Ginat’Dania, heading west. Then a good long time afterwards, Johann Toller arrives in England and starts to preach. And you can tell he’s your guy because of all the stuff he says. He knows about Ginat’Dania. He knows about the three-thousand-year cycle. And how else could he have found that out?
‘But what happened in the meantime? What made him abandon his mission and his people and go native like that?’
‘An angel,’ Ber Lusim said, his voice almost a growl, ‘spoke to him.’
‘Right.’ Rush nodded. ‘An angel spoke to him and gave him the secrets of heaven. And Toller wanted to share the amazing things he’d learned. He felt like he had to share it with the whole world. So he goes to England.
‘And this is where I kind of lose the plot. It’s the Civil War. The political scene in England is a snake pit, but Toller jumps in like it’s a swimming pool. He makes all kinds of friends and enemies in Cromwell’s government. He rallies the religious dissenters — becomes one of their spokesmen, kind of. He joins the Fifth Monarchy movement. Gets a seat at the table. And I’m asking myself: why? What is the point of it all? If you’ve seen the eternal truth, why would you care whether Cromwell or Fairfax keep their promises, or whether bishops get to speak in parliament? It’s a sideshow. The world is going to end, the kingdom is going to come and that’s all that matters.’
Diema pulled her attention away from the doctrinal argument and looked for her gun. It was far enough away that she’d have to crawl to reach it and it looked as though it had taken a direct hit in any case.
But she had the other gun, in her ankle holster: the tiny, modest little M26 that she’d taken from Nahir and Shraga almost as an afterthought.
She groaned and rolled over as though she were in agony, using the movement to curl her legs up and bring them closer to her left hand. It felt as though her right wrist might have been broken when Ber Lusim shot the gun out of her hand — an outrageous feat, even at this short a distance.
‘Time is contained within eternity, like the grit in a pearl,’ Ber Lusim was saying. ‘Toller saw all things, both close and far away. And he cared about all things.’
Rush held up the book, his hand shaking even more noticeably. ‘Okay, maybe. Maybe it happened like that. But here’s another scenario: Toller was nobody. Just some guy. But he was British. He came out of England, maybe doing the whole grand tour thing, or maybe because he was a merchant or a diplomat.
‘So he’s travelling through the Alps, and he has an accident. Only he’s not alone when he has it. And he’s not the only survivor. There’s another man, lying next to him — injured, probably dying. That’s your prophet, fresh out of Ginat’Dania. And that’s the moment when everything changes for Toller. That’s where his life turns upside down.
‘Because the injured man is hallucinating, and he can’t stop talking. Or else it’s just that he knows he’s dying. He’s got to tell his life story to someone before he goes, and Toller’s right there. Toller’s listening. Listening with every ear he’s got.’
‘This is grotesque,’ Ber Lusim said.
‘So Toller gets the whole story. The holy betrayer. The secret city. The end of the world. It’s a revelation. No, it’s a whole book of revelations. And it’s got to be the truth, because who’s going to waste the last hours of his life spinning such a crazy story? It’s as though God put this man just in the right place, just at the right time, so that Toller’s eyes could be opened.
‘And when it was done, and the man was dead, Toller went home to England and picked up his life again. Except now he was a prophet. A man with a message. And he wanted to give the message as much authority as he could, so he came up with the angel’s visitation. Or maybe that was how he actually remembered it by this time, I don’t know. Maybe he really thought your man was an angel.’
‘Why should this thing be true?’ Ber Lusim demanded. ‘Where is your evidence?’
Diema had pulled the leg of her jeans up three inches from her ankle, exposing the holster. The gun was lying ready to her hand. But now another problem presented itself. Two problems, in fact. How was she going to get through Ber Lusim’s guard any better the second time, now that she was using her weaker, slower hand? And how was she going to draw and fire on him without hitting Rush, who was directly in the way? She saw that Kennedy was watching her, ready to move when she did.
‘It’s not about the evidence,’ Rush said, ‘although I do have some. A little, anyway. But think about it. Doesn’t my version make more sense? In your story, a Messenger decides out of nowhere to betray his sacred trust and go preach to the heathens. In mine, he only talks because he knows he’s dying.’
‘He didn’t just decide,’ Ber Lusim said. ‘You’re forgetting that he had a visitation from God.’
‘And this visitation somehow gave him a complete who’s who of English politics? And it made him think that English politics actually mattered? Because he spent the rest of his life there, Ber Lusim. He was executed for trying to murder some kind of government clerk. What the hell was that?’
Ber Lusim took a step towards Rush, but Rush backed away. He held the book in his two hands, ready to tear it down the length of its spine. ‘You better back off,’ he warned Ber Lusim. ‘Or I’m going to commit some serious blasphemy.’